Archive for the ‘Art’ Category

I’ve been photographing birds for a few years now. The title may be a bit misleading, I haven’t photographed my one hundredth bird… I’ve photographed my one hundredth bird within a single country. And oddly enough, it’s not Australia.

Despite living here, I’ve so far only managed to photograph 94 different Australian bird species. But on my recent trip to Tanzania, I spent about five days looking at wildlife, and I took a lot of photos of birds. I still haven’t inspected all of the photos to identify the species, but last night I identified the one hundredth species from the photos I took on that trip. So I now have 100 species of birds photographed in on country: Tanzania.

I found some old negatives of photos I took on my very first overseas trip, to Egypt in 1980. Some were photos I didn’t have copies of and hadn’t seen for decades, so I had them scanned. They’re on 110 format film, which is tiny, and the quality isn’t great – but still exciting to see these, among the very first photos I ever took.

I really should go through all my old travel photos and specifically look for photos of birds that I never identified. I just found another species of bird that wasn’t in my list of photographed species, lurking in some old photos from my 2011 trip to South America.

Anyway, yesterday I was browsing around on iTunes, and I tried entering “Duckworth Lewis Method”, and I discovered they’d released a second album – back in 2013 – called Sticky Wickets. Since I liked the first album so much, I decided to buy it.

I was listening to the album for the first time, and the 8th track began, a song called Line and Length. As I listened to the lyrics, an odd feeling of recognition came over me. The lyrics seemed to be using the definitions of the cricket jargon terms “line” and “length” from Wikipedia.

The line of a delivery is the direction of its trajectory measured in the horizontal axis.The length of a delivery is how far down the pitch towards the batsman the ball bounces.

Then I realised why the words sounded so familiar. I checked the edit history of the Wikipedia article.

Here is a post-mortem analysis of the financials of running this Kickstarter campaign, for general edification and posterity. All amounts are in Australian dollars (AUD) unless indicated (converted from US dollars at the exchange rate on the date of transaction, if applicable).

First, the good news! Here’s how much income I made from the Kickstarter! Wowee!

Kickstarter income

Kickstarter pledges

$23935.39

Dropped pledges (backer didn’t pay)

-$255.00

Refunds

-$160.00

Subtotal

$23520.39

Kickstarter fee (5% of subtotal)

-$1176.02

Kickstarter payment processing fees

-$802.22

Total transfer to me from Kickstarter

$21542.15

Now some mildly bad news: Here are the expenses I incurred in putting the book together, advertising the Kickstarter, mailing out original artwork as rewards for higher tier backers, and other miscellaneous things.

My work gets daily newspaper deliveries, and at afternoon tea break some of us like to flip to the puzzles page to try to solve today’s Target (a nine-letter word polygon puzzle). On the facing page is the comics section, which contains a typical selection of daily newspaper comics: Calvin and Hobbes, Hagar the Horrible, Garfield, Snake, Phantom, and… the venerable Fred Basset. Some of these comics are occasionally funny (well, except Phantom, which is a serialised drama) – except Fred Basset. It’s just an endless stream of what look like attempts to make a gag, but which consistently fail to deliver any sort of punchline.

So we started discussing making a blog to explain why each Fred Basset strip is actually hilariously funny, even if you, the average naive reader, don’t realise it. We’ve been discussing this for a while, and given the most recent strip, I finally decided to give it a go. So here goes:

This is a typical Fred Basset strip. Seemingly nothing funny, or even slightly amusing on the surface. It in fact looks like a tired retread of a “joke” that Garfield has been perpetrating for decades: animal is lazy. Ha ha.

But no, to reach this conclusion and go no further is to miss the tragic underpinning of true comedy embodied by this simple set of three panels. The titular Fred is old. He’s been doing this routine of getting up out of his comfortable bed every day for … more years than a simple dog can count. His mortality weighs heavily on his weary bones, and in his heart he knows his days are numbered.

Today, he is lucky enough to get up out of this bed once again. But Fred knows there is a good chance that this is the last day he will ever get up. The first panel is the slowly dawning realisation that he is still on this mortal coil – a realisation made thus slow by his fading mental capacities. It takes a full beat panel in the middle for him to come to terms with the fact that his eternal rest will require at least one more day of struggle against the inanities of his life, in a middle class London home with a similarly ageing couple of humans who never do anything to make his life more interesting or amusing.

In the final panel we get the double whammy of the punchline. “But not quite running!” As if Fred, with his arthritic legs and reduced lung capacity, could run anywhere any more. The fading memory of running brings to mind young days as a puppy spent frolicking in sunny fields of a never-ending summer – yet we all know that summer ends, and with it comes autumn, and twilight. Winter is coming, Fred, and you know it.

As his front paw touches that cold, hard, unfeeling linoleum floor, he feels the chill enter his body and penetrate to his osteoporotic bones. Running! Ha!

Yes, Fred, not quite… not quite. And therein lies the true humour. Dark, enfolding its ever-reaching, cold, black tendrils around the amusement centres of your soul. A creeping mist that reminds you of your own impending doom, but then laughs it off as the mere follies of a dog with human thoughts. And so we laugh, for there is little else we can do, and go about our business.